Update on Nuclear Proliferation

MICHAEL R. BOLDRICK

In December 1995, after NATO jet fighters silenced Serbian artillery
barrages directed against civilian targets in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Russian President Boris Yeltsin warned that continued Western
operations in the Balkans could result in "a conflagration
of war throughout Europe." A scant month later, TheNew York Times quoted a Peking official's boast that the
United States would not oppose China's threat to bombard Taiwan
with conventional missiles because America's leaders "care
more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan."

Does this fiery rhetoric from Moscow and Peking mean the Clinton
Administration is flat wrong in the belief that nuclear weapons
have little national security value in the post-Cold War era?
Or does it place the first nail in the coffin of the rogue state
doctrine formalized in the Pentagon's 1993 Bottom-Up Review?

Professor Kenneth E. Waltz at the University of California, Berkeley,
would probably answer yes to both questions. Writing in The
Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, Waltz states, "As
ever in international politics, the biggest dangers come from
the biggest powers; the smallest from the smallest. We should
be more fearful of old nuclear countries and less fearful of recent
and prospective ones."

If Waltz is correct, then the United States made a significant
error in reformulating military and foreign policy after the breakup
of the Soviet Union. Michael Klare, Professor of Peace and World
Security Studies at Hampshire College, joins Waltz in rejecting
the rogue state doctrine, not because of the on-again, off-again
belligerence of Russia and China or nuclear proliferation, but
because "global chaos" poses the real threat to our
national security.

Writing in Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America's Search
for a New Foreign Policy, Klare notes that between 1947 and
1989 the Pentagon spent $11.5 trillion on defense. The main objective
of the post-Cold War rogue state doctrine, according to Klare,
was to refill the "threat bank" with an enemy notorious
enough to assure continued congressional support for high defense
budgets.

Rather than blaming the Pentagon, Klare credits former President
Ronald Reagan for first envisioning the new enemy of the 1990s.
Four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a speech before
the American Bar Association on 8 July 1985, the "Great Communicator"
warned his audience of "a confederation of terrorist states
. . . trained, financed, and controlled" by a group of "outlaw
states" seeking to undermine US foreign policy objectives.
The Third World powers who would later replace the Soviet Union
as the top threat to US national security were identified by Reagan
as Cuba, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, and North Korea. In a quirk of
history, it was Iraq (the "outlaw state" not mentioned
in President Reagan's speech because the United States was then
allied with Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran) that later
convinced the American public of the validity of the rogue state
doctrine.

Dissenting from the conventional wisdom on the importance of Desert
Storm, Klare states, "The fact that it accomplished so little
of a lasting political nature should caution against placing much
confidence in the ability of military action to achieve US objectives
in a period of such turmoil and uncertainty." This perspective
leads Klare to advocate a military whose overriding goal is the
"reduction of global discord and violence." This would
be accomplished through the contraction of international arms
trade, strengthening of international peacemaking institutions,
promotion of economic and social welfare, and prevention of environmental
decline.

If Klare has an aversion for using force to settle disputes in
the New World Order, Paddy Griffith, former senior lecturer in
War Studies at the Royal Military Academy, offers a modern cultural
explanation. Writing in the fifth annual report of the UK-chartered
Verification Technology Information Centre (VERTIC), Verification
1995: Arms Control, Peacekeeping, and the Environment, Griffith
observes "the use of conventional ground forces by advanced
Western governments has today become almost as unthinkable as
the use of nuclear weapons became after 1945 or the use of chemical
weapons after 1918."

Griffith's chapter in the VERTIC anthology, "The Body Bag
as Deterrent and Peace Dividend," uses examples from history
to defend his thesis. The West's practice of burying its dead
on foreign soil ended with World War II. The once remote fields
of white crosses came home to American during Vietnam as each
casualty was flown back to the United States for burial. Thanks
to television, the death of a soldier was an intimate and tragic
event involving everybody's next-door neighbor. The effect was
profound: the body bag became as important a determinant of policy
as national interest. Consequently, President Carter cancelled
the 1980 Teheran hostage rescue after eight deaths at Desert One.
President Reagan ended attempts to intervene in the 1983 Beirut
Crisis after 231 Marines were killed by a suicide bomber. And
President Clinton called off the Somalia peacekeeping operation
in 1994 after 18 Rangers died during a firefight in Mogadishu.

The use of "overwhelming force" manifested in Desert
Storm, in addition to guaranteeing a quick military victory, also
had a corollary goal to limit casualties. While successful--coalition
losses numbered around 700 killed and wounded--the easy defeat
of the world's fourth largest military power had an unforeseen
consequence: if a major army can be defeated with such a "trifling
loss," operations against smaller powers can now presumably
be conducted without any casualties at all. The truth of this
observation by Griffith is evident in the cautious US deployment
in Bosnia-Herzegovina where minimization of casualties is more
important than mission success.

This growing unwillingness to take losses associated with combat
operations gives renewed importance to arms control and disarmament
treaties. Here again, ambiguities of the post-Cold War era work
against US interests. Shortly after releasing the Bottom-Up Review,
then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin offered a rationale for making
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) the cornerstone of
US arms control policy. "The new nuclear danger is a handful
of devices in the hands of rogue states," Aspin noted, and
"the engine of the new danger is proliferation."

Recent experience in Iraq and North Korea (two Third World nations
that joined the NPT, underwent on-site inspections by the International
Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], and yet either came close to developing
or did in fact develop nuclear devices) casts doubt on the effectiveness
of the 1971 treaty. Going a step further, at least one prominent
writer is swimming against the anti-proliferation tide in the
apparent belief that "more may be better."

In a lively point-counterpoint exchange, two leading authorities
on nuclear proliferation trade verbal volleys in a rhetorical
version of the Big Game where Stanford and UC Berkeley meet on
the gridiron. Believing there is little to fear from the slow
spread of nuclear weapons, Berkeley political scientist Kenneth
Waltz (The Spread Of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate ) says even
rogue states behave more responsibly after joining the nuclear
club. Noting there has not been a world war since two atomic bombs
ended the last one, Waltz believes "nuclear weapons make
wars hard to start." The same nuclear taboo that restrained
the Soviet Union and the United States during the bipolar Cold
War should extend into the coming era of multipolarity as regional
rivals opt for small nuclear arsenals.

Countering that "more will be worse," Stanford political
scientist Scott Sagan believes the new nuclear states will lack
the organizational structures to ensure safe and rational control
of superweapons. While accepting Waltz's theory that more nuclear
states may be our fate, Sagan chides his rival and other proliferation
optimists for confusing "what rational states should do with
predictions of what real states will do."

So, what to do about the coming dilemma of proliferation? "Very
little" would likely be Waltz's reply, since "new nuclear
states will feel the constraints that present nuclear states have
experienced." Sagan would minimize the danger with a proactive
agenda where US diplomats support civilian control of weapons
in the new nuclear states, share secure basing technology to ensure
a deterrent promoting second-strike capability, and share technology
perfected in the West promoting nuclear safety.

Going a step beyond the Stanford vs. Berkeley verbal joust, Steven
Lee's essay "Nuclear Proliferation and Nuclear Entitlement"
(Ethics & International Affairs) asks if it's morally
permissible for a nonnuclear state to acquire nuclear weapons.
Citing just war theory, Lee observes that while aggression is
impermissible, self-defense is permissible only to the extent
it satisfies conditions of discrimination and proportionality.
In Lee's analysis, nuclear deterrence never passes the discrimination
test because the destructive power of nuclear weapons makes it
virtually impossible to attack combatants without injuring noncombatants
(or innocents).

The proportionality (benefit exceeds harm) tenet is met if nuclear
weapons offer the only means for survival against a clearly superior
foe. Even in this rare case (Lee cites Israel as meeting the proportionality
test while South Africa's now defunct arsenal did not), Lee concludes
that proliferation is outside just war bounds, even in survival
cases, because possession of nuclear weapons violates one of the
theory's two conditions. Citing the apparent conflict between
morality and prudence, a conflict within morality itself according
to Lee, the author concludes that the just war theory is an inadequate
tool for assessing the acceptability of proliferation when a nation's
survival is at stake.

Moving back to real world politics, Lee confronts the issue of
anti-proliferation. What can the major powers do, beyond diplomatic
measures, to prevent proliferation? Not much, in Lee's opinion.
He objects to overt measures like Israel's 1981 attack against
Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak, or even the extended security
guarantees offered smaller states by major powers. Standing under
an ally's nuclear umbrella, according to Lee, simply displaces
the moral wrong involved in the direct acquisition of nuclear
weapons.

Between Griffith's body bags and Lee's moral aversion to overt
antiproliferation, arms control would appear to be the best hope
for global civility in the New World Order. But here too there
are flaws, according to David A. Kay's "Preventive Approaches:
Expectations and Limitations for Inspections," one of 16
papers compiled in Weapons of Mass Destruction: New Perspectives
in Counterproliferation.Citing an example from history
that modern politicians ignore, Kay tells the sad story of the
Versailles Peace Treaty enacted after World War I. To monitor
German disarmament, the treaty allowed "anytime, anywhere,
with anything" inspections. Between 1919 and 1927, some 1400
Allied officers and support personnel conducted almost 34,000
on-site inspections of suspected military facilities. Yet a bigger
and deadlier second world war followed the most intrusive arms
control treaty imposed in this century.

Acknowledging that on-site inspections don't always guarantee
compliance, Kay uncovers the Achilles' Heel of modern arms control
agreements. He chides the United States for assuming compliance
is the norm for East-West agreements. Such complacency quickly
brands anomalies as "mistakes" or the result of "disorganization."
Disturbing trends such as Russia's "commercial" version
of the START-limited SS-25 ICBM, deliberate underreporting of
chemical weapons, and continued production of biological weapons
in violation of a 20-year-old treaty add credence to Kay's warning.

Updating an especially disturbing trend by Uncle Sam to look the
other way, Kathleen Bailey accuses the Clinton Administration
of taking the easy way out in the North Korean challenge to the
NPT. In "The Nuclear Deal with North Korea: Is the Glass
Half Empty or Half Full?" Bailey lists three options available
when Pyongyang ignored IAEA inspectors: negotiations, sanctions,
and intervention. Choosing the first solution, Bailey believes,
set a precedent for extortion with potentially far-reaching consequences
to US interests in the Far East.

As the United States trims defense spending, the Japanese Maritime
Self-Defense Force is expanding its patrol area from coastal defense
to a 1000 nautical-mile perimeter reaching close to Guam and the
Philippines. The significance of potentially hostile operations
within this perimeter (Chinese live-fire exercises in the Taiwan
Strait and North Korea's No Dong missile tests in the Sea Of Japan)
is certainly not lost on Tokyo. Without the US-Japan Security
Treaty, an artifact of the Cold War that still extends the US
nuclear umbrella over East Asia, a dangerous arms race among Japan,
China, both Koreas, and Taiwan could emerge, threatening global
stability. These observations are some of the key issues discussed
in The United States, Japan, and The Future of Nuclear Weapons.
That Carnegie-sponsored report on US-Japan relations also notes
a growing dependence on nuclear power in the region due to instability
in fossil fuel supplies.

Joseph Cirincione's Current History article "The Non-Proliferation
Treaty and the Nuclear Balance" notes that, while the nuclear
weapon states have over 1500 tons of fissile materials in weapon
stockpiles, there is an additional 900 tons held by civilian reactor
programs. Japan alone has nearly ten tons of plutonium which could
easily be formed into plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. That
space-faring nation also has the missile technology to become
a major military power if dwindling US interest in the region
fuels an arms race in East Asia.

Republic of China writer Lin Yufang believes a dangerous arms
buildup may have already started in East Asia. Fueled by political
strife, increasing financial capability to purchase arms, and
more open markets for arms exporters, growing tensions in the
region cannot be curbed by a collective security system. Rather
than arms control or regional political alliances, Yufang sees
economic cooperation as the catalyst for restoring stability to
East Asia. Yufang's observations are published in an anthology,
The Diffusion of Advanced Weaponry: Technologies, Regional
Implications, and Responses.

As new regional alliances form on the post-Cold War landscape,
to borrow again from Waltz's warning about old nuclear powers,
what about the other major nuclear states once closely allied
with the United States or Russia? In Strategic Views from the
Second Tier, the nuclear policies of France, Britain, and
China are discussed from the viewpoint of writers native to those
countries.

Russian-US arms control treaties give rising importance to the
nuclear arsenals of the second-tier powers. During the Cold War,
the combined warhead count of China, France, and England was only
seven to ten percent of the superpower total. After START II is
implemented, the figure will rise to 50 percent.

France, a maverick during its absence from NATO's integrated military
command structure, acknowledges no enemy. Instead, to quote a
Defense Ministry official, "Our deterrent is at the service
of our independence." England, which maintains nuclear weapons
as general insurance in a changing world, does not want to leave
the "anchor" role exclusively to the United States and
Russia. Both France and England are moving the bulk of their nuclear
forces to sea. Lacking a counterforce capability, London and Paris
acknowledge the need to maintain a secure, second-strike capability
and are opting for the survivability offered by a submarine force.

China looks to its growing nuclear capability as important to
regional security in East Asia. Believing its large population
offers a significant advantage in a nuclear exchange, China has
maintained a "no-first-use policy" since exploding its
first atomic weapon. Like France and England, China depends on
concealment to promote survivability of its forces.

The second-tier states are unanimous in eschewing arms control:
"Our arsenals are already at the minimum level." So
far (China may soon become the exception) all three nations look
to their nuclear forces for deterrence, not war-fighting. While
many would see this as stabilizing, there is a downside in forces
unable to escalate from tactical to strategic targets. The credibility
of French, English, and Chinese nuclear forces, as currently postured,
resides in a second-strike capability against cities. This policy
has the ring of terrorism where pure destruction becomes the objective.
A Chinese official offered a chilling summation of deterrence
based on holding population centers hostage, "Does it matter
if we hit the Kremlin or the Bolshoi Theater?"

Post-Cold War history, if these writers are correct, is clearly
not following the rogue doctrine script. While US forces commit
to peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, northern
Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia, Waltz's "biggest powers"--China,
North Korea, and Russia--probe Western resolve.

The latest initiative from the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency calls for development of an operations concept and implementing
technology to support small-unit operations. Squad-sized forces
would operate autonomously in Third World countries or urban areas
during peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations. Unmanned
airborne vehicles (UAVs) would patrol the skies during a small-unit
operation, keeping a lid on the body-bag count. Meanwhile, diplomacy,
arms control, and non-proliferation treaties are allegedly checking
the hegemony of the "biggest powers."

While China again looks at reunification with Taiwan, North Korea
counts its latest ration of concessions from the United States,
and the Russian Communist Party becomes a major contender in a
national election, the West enjoys the fruits of a peace dividend.
But when the band begins to play for Waltz's "biggest powers,"
will arms control, shuttle diplomacy, and sticky foam carry the
day?

W. Thomas Wander, Eric H. Arnett, and Paul Bracken. The Diffusion
of Advanced Weaponry: Technologies, Regional Implications, and
Responses (Washington: American Association for the Advancement
of Science Program on Science and International Security, 1994).

The Reviewer: Colonel Michael R. Boldrick (USAF Ret.) is
a program director with the Engineering Research Group of SRI
International (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo
Park, California. He is also an advisor on strategic military
issues to SRI's Washington-based Center for Global Security Planning.
Most of his Air Force career was spent with Strategic Air Command
(SAC). Colonel Boldrick holds an M.S. in economics from South
Dakota State University.

Review Essay

An Earlier Revolution
in Military Affairs

PAUL F. BRAIM

As the military community struggles to define what it is calling
a revolution in military affairs, it may be instructive to review
the history of an earlier military revolution caused by the weaponry
of the Machine Age, at about the last turn of the century. Some
historians of that era (including this reviewer) have identified
strong cultural associations within an animal-powered society
as the primary reason why late 19th-century military leadership
declined to adapt to new weaponry. Recent scholarship on that
era, however, has recorded a lively interchange of informed opinion
within the educated elite of the officer corps of the military
services on new weapons, and upon tactics to employ or defend
against them. These scholars show that failure of the US military
to modernize for the new 20th century was due, in the main, to
the parsimony of military appropriations, and the absence of a
modern potential enemy.

Graham Cosmas of the US Army's Center of Military History leads
the school of those who write of that period who condemn the penury
of a short-sighted US Congress for those glaring deficiencies
in military effectiveness revealed by the Spanish-American War.
In his landmark study, An Army for Empire: The United States
Army in the Spanish-American War, Cosmas shows that many of
the shortcomings of the army that tumbled ashore in Cuba are traceable
directly to lack of appropriations for weaponry, equipment, and
even for subsistence supplies; he also traces many of the failures
to petty interferences in organization, operations, and command
by President William McKinley and by a Congress influenced by
state militia leaders.

Cosmas's theme is echoed by most of the contributors to James
C. Bradford's Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War
and its Aftermath. Contributing to this volume, Cosmas highlights
the success of "ad hoc" joint operations between the
Army and Navy, even though these operations were conducted under
a cloud of mutual suspicion and distrust among the leaders of
the two services. Bradford focuses this volume upon the significant
command and administrative lessons learned from the war, and upon
the "Root Revolution" in organization and staff operations
provoked by US Secretary of War Elihu Root at the beginning of
what became "The American Century."

The US Navy of that time fared somewhat better than the Army,
although penurious funding also prevented development of adequate
seapower to protect the nation's rapid expansion of its commercial
reach across the globe. This inadequacy is one lesson revealed
by the Spanish-American War, according to A. B. Feuer, in his
new book The Spanish-American War at Sea: Naval Action in the
Atlantic. Feuer concludes, "The Spanish-American War
was a sobering warning for the United States Army and Navy."
He quotes from an article in the Boston Globe that the
war "was a priceless lesson, and cheaply learned. If we had
been compelled to learn it in the face of a formidable foe--like
Germany--we would have had to go through an abyss of humiliation."

The formalization of after-action analyses by the US Army at the
turn of the century is revealed in a slim monograph by Dennis
J. Vetock, Lessons Learned: A History of US Army Lesson Learning.
While Vetock extends his study through the War in Vietnam, he
shows an increased appreciation of "lessons learned"
with the onset of the 20th century. He also reveals the relegation
of much of this valuable experiential information to dusty files.

With further respect to lessons learned, John T. Greenwood, in
his article "The U.S. Army Military Observers with the Japanese
Army during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)," reveals
a lively questioning of the effectiveness of the new mass-casualty
weapons and the tactics to employ or operate against them. While
Greenwood admits that American observations, including those from
US observers with the Russian side, led to mixed conclusions,
his strongest findings are of the high level of scholarly disputation
within the US Army officer corps. Greenwood concludes that the
officers of the Old Army possessed "a remarkable degree of
professionalism, intellectual vitality, and knowledge of modern
military science, in view of their lack of higher military education,
and the circumstances of their service in a largely frontier army."

Even the most innovative military thinkers struggled with little
success to devise tactics that could maximize or neutralize the
effects of the new weapons. A new book by Perry Jamieson, Crossing
the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899,
catalogues the general belief in the late 19th century, growing
out of the American Civil War, that the devastating firepower
of improved small arms and artillery made defense dominant on
the battlefields of the future. Many military writers of that
period assayed the cost of "crossing the deadly ground"
as prohibitive of success in any measure, while some few argued
that maneuver of massed attackers could be successful on the deadly
battlefield through high esprit alone. Committees and boards examined
the problem of attacking seemingly impregnable defenses; these
boards modified small-unit tactics for attack, generally by employing
less vulnerable, dispersed formations.

A problem in spreading attack formations, which persists to this
day, is the amount of dispersion between individual infantrymen
that can be achieved without sacrificing control of the attacking
formation. The greater the spread of the attackers, the more difficult
it becomes for the tactical leader to exercise control through
voice and gestures. Jamieson makes the point that this problem
was at least partly solved in the 20th century with the development
of the field radio; however, this reviewer's pertinent experience
leads to the conclusion that the problem of close assault against
final-protective fire is greater than one of control. It becomes
very difficult to mass assault fires while attacking in spread
formations. Until recently, infantry field manuals described "marching
fire" as the solution, but this technique requires soldiers
to assault together in upright posture, increasing their vulnerability
to a protected enemy. Spreading formations also increases individual
fear, as the spirit of group bravery is attenuated. Jamieson concludes
that assaulting against modern fires was a harrowing experience
through World War I. Crossing the deadly ground remains, and will
remain, a death experience for many in the assaulting force.

Despite the intellectual ferment described above, most of the
writers admit the inertia of the military of that day, and note
the limited effectiveness of the "lessons learned" in
provoking changes in tactics and procedures. Of this resistance,
Jamieson says, "Most soldiers held on to their traditional
ideas about tactics and resisted change, and others simply had
no interest in the subject." One can find such sentiments
expressed in many other military histories of the period.

A valuable complement to the texts cited above is Donald H. Dyal's
Historical Dictionary of the Spanish American War. Offering
a wide array of entries on events and personalities related to
that war, Dyal includes a pithy preface on the significance of
the Spanish American War to America's role in international affairs;
he also summarizes existing scholarship and reference material
on the period.

Something more than numerology leads to the expectation that the
turn of a century brings about a new era in human affairs. Certainly
one can, from the hindsight of history, verify the hopes and fears
of those Americans who stood on the threshold of the 20th century
struggling to understand the power of the machine. That their
perceptual horizons were too limited, and their resistance to
change ultimately futile, may be a lesson for today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradford, James C., ed. Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American
War and its Aftermath. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press,
1993.

Cosmas, Graham A. An Army for Empire: The United States Army
in The Spanish-American War. Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane
Press, 1994.

Vetock, Dennis J. Lessons Learned: A History of U S Army Lesson
Learning. Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: US Army Military History
Institute, 1988.

The Reviewer: Colonel Paul F. Braim (USA Ret.) is Professor
of History at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. He holds a
Ph.D. from the University of Delaware and has written and lectured
on military history and military affairs.